We’re in the middle of a great Alfred Hitchcock run, with another best film of the year. Hot on his tail is the burgeoning international filmmakers finding their groove, with all timers out of France and India bolstering a solid international film collection.
It doesn’t quite hit the “for all ages” sweet spot Disney usually gets to, but kids will love this tale of princesses, witches, and fairy tales. Maleficent is also one of the great Disney villains, oozing menace and shapeshifting intimidating power.
Satyajit Ray concludes his great trilogy on his terms. This is a movie about what to do in the face of old rigid societal customs, as Apu either has to marry a woman he’s agreed to marry but doesn’t want to, or doom her to a life of spinstressing. Ray paints a full picture of Indian life, previously unfamiliar to most of the West, and ends the trilogy with a similar deliberate pace to let you soak in the foreign setting for most Western viewers.
Howard Hawks’s Western isn’t breaking what ain’t broke. John Wayne, Dean Martin and a big fun cast tell the tale of a County Sheriff (Wayne) waiting on a US Marshal to transfer a murderer to jail, but the murderer has powerful, gun toting friends making the Sheriff’s life hell.
A movie that helped the West understand what was happening in Japan after World War II. The great Emmanuelle Riva, a nurse in Hiroshima, engages in an affair with Japanese architect Eiji Okada, as the pair try to make sense of the new world their in, healing from the gaping wounds of the life altering atomic bomb explosion.
Otto Preminger’s classic courtroom drama takes place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Jimmy Stewart is a defense attorney for Ben Gazzara, who admitted to the murder because the man he murdered sexually assaulted Lee Remick. Lawyering against Stewart is George C. Scott, who sees this as an open and closed case. This movie also pushes the envelope for its time, referring to all sorts of sexual terms not heard on film before.
Billy Wilder’s looney farce is beloved by most everyone, though I think it’s aged a bit on the “men dressed as women learn how hard it is to be a woman” front. That being said, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are a lot of fun as young guys evading gangsters who stumble into a gold mine of beautiful bombshells. But Marilyn Monroe, more than just a sexpot, shows how talented an actress she is playing the aloof alluring compadre of the boys, who can’t help but fall for her. Wilder also caps off the film with one of the great comedy endings in movie history.
One of the great stories in human history, this movie adaptation of Anne Frank’s writings captures the day to day struggles of teenage life, but also of perpetual danger, as two Jewish families cramped in an attic have to be silent all day while Nazi’s patrol Amsterdam. It’s a movie of hopes, dreams, and tragic melancholy.
I started watching Ben-Hur a week ago and just finished today. Long movie! However, William Wyler’s great film has got all sorts of big, big spectacle to dazzle the eyes, including a chariot race to end all chariot races, booming Charlton Heston, and amazing shots of gigantic cities with people everywhere, and maybe a few appearances from Jesus himself. It’s self important, but also pretty dazzling when it wants to be.
From the Biblical grandeur to the tininess of Parisian middle school we go in one of Francois Truffaut’s masterpieces. Though small in style, this movie’s themes are just as big as Ben Hur’s especially in how subtle and effective Truffaut is at showing how systemic forces from an early age can put just an adolescent into the meat grinder of life: neglectful parents, poor teaching, unflinching criminal justice system, and yet, that melancholy is brilliantly hidden by Truffaut by showing us a boy living to be free and have fun.
One of the great thrillers in American History. Cary Grant stars as Hitchcock’s wrongfully accused man, Roger Thornhill, who keeps ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time due to horrible timing. This luck puts Grant in a criminal web with which he must untangle himself, featuring a chilly James Mason, Eva Marie Saint as the Hitchcock Blond, and one of the greatest sequences in movie history involving a crop dusting plane.
